Quotes from Bart D. Ehrman

The way to escape our entrapment in this world of matter is to acquire secret "knowledge" (= gnosis) from above of who we really are, how we came to be here, and how we can return to our heavenly, spiritual home.

Paul did not see himself as switching religions. He came to realize that Christ was the fulfillment of Judaism, of everything that God had planned and revealed within the sacred Jewish Scriptures.

We remember the past not only as it actually happened but also in light of what is important to us in our own lives. (8)

The enemies of God might imprison, torture, and kill the apostles of Christ, but they could never stop the forward movement of the mission.

the art of the possible.

If you accept the Bible, you should accept it for what it is: a document of faith that is not a history book.

The books we call the New Testament were not gathered together into one canon and considered scripture, finally and ultimately, until hundreds of years after the books themselves had first been produced.

Yet none of these models actually is hydrogen!

Pascal's Wager says that given the choice, even if the odds for success are slim, it is better for her to take the risk: there is nothing for her to lose and a lot for her to gain.

Some superscholars of the day such as Origen tried to resolve the problems in more sophisticated ways, but these views also led to ideas that were later deemed objectionable, such as the view that all of us have souls that preexisted and were brought into the world as a form of punishment.

Many Christians today may think that the canon of the New Testament simply appeared on the scene one day, soon after the death of Jesus, but nothing could be farther from the truth.

The decisions about which books should finally be considered canonical were not automatic or problem-free; the debates were long and drawn out, and sometimes harsh.

Skepticism is demanding evidence before believing; cynicism is not believing even with evidence

people either live in the light or walk in the darkness; they either stand for the truth or propagate error.

among their number was the chief official, the high priest.

But the reality is that most of these symbols would have been quite simple for anyone at the time to discern, whether a devoted Christian or a Roman pagan.

Moreover, this earlier tradition has a different view of Christ than the one that Paul explicates elsewhere in his surviving writings. Here, unlike in Paul's writings ... the idea that Jesus was made the Son of God precisely at his resurrection is also stressed.

You may think God is justified in his anger. But having infants dashed to pieces and pregnant mothers ripped open?

No, what made Jesus different from all the others teaching a similar message was the claim that he had been raised from the dead.

I have often wondered what would have happened if Paul and Matthew had been locked up in a room together and told they could not come out until they had hammered out a consensus statement on how followers of Jesus were to deal with the Jewish law. Would they ever have emerged, or would they still be there, two skeletons locked in a death grip? If

if I was truly committed to God, I also had to be fully committed to the truth.

And so we have two contrasting portrayals of Paul's view of the pagans and their worship of idols. Do they worship idols out of ignorance? The "Paul" of Acts says yes, Paul in his own writings says no. Does God overlook what they've done? Acts says yes, Paul says no. Are they responsible for their idolatrous activities? Acts says no, Paul says yes. Does God inflict his wrathful judgment on them in the present as a result? Acts says no, Paul says yes.

Back, then, to my original question: Is this the God of the New Testament?

Acts is theological history, while the Gospels are theological biographies, i.e., biographies written with a theological agenda.